Does Anybody Really Know What Time It is?

• The dinosaurs went extinct before grass and flowering plants evolved.
  
  
• There are caves in the Appalachian Mountains that predate the existence of land animals with bones. Not dinosaurs. Bones.
  
  
• Woolly mammoths were still around when the Great Pyramid was built.
  
  
• Cleopatra lived closer to the Apollo 11 moon landings than to the construction of the Pyramids of Giza.
  
  
• The University of Oxford is older than the Inca Empire.
  
  
• Cambridge University is older than the Aztecs.
  
  
• For the first few years after Harvard was founded, that school didn't teach calculus because calculus hadn't been invented yet.
  
  
• The Maori came to New Zealand around the same time Dante was writing The Divine Comedy.
  
  
• We are at the same distance in time away from the start of WWII as the start of WWII was from the Dred Scott decision, and as the Dred Scott decision was from the Declaration of Independence.
  
  
• When the UK ended slavery, the government decided to compensate slave owners for their financial loss, a debt that wasn't fully paid off until 2015, almost 200 years later.
  
  
• Haiti, a French colony from 1659 to 1804, was forced to buy its liberation from France, a debt it paid down for 143 years, from 1804 to 1947.
  
  
• Harriet Tubman was born in Thomas Jefferson's lifetime and died in Reagan's.
  
  
• Quincy Jones was raised by his grandmother, a former slave.
  
  
• Chuck Grassley was 5 years old when the chocolate chip cookie was invented.
  
  
• Betty White is older than packaged sliced bread, which means for a while sliced bread was the best thing since Betty White.
  
  
• One of the Wright Brothers lived long enough to see his invention get used to drop nuclear bombs on Japan.
  
  
• Queen Elizabeth II has been Queen of England for more than a quarter of the total time the United States has existed.
  
  
• The last person collecting a civil war pension died in June 2020 -- the widow of a veteran.
  
  
• Smallpox killed more people in the 20th century than all the wars combined. Now it no longer exists, thanks to science and vaccinations.
  
  
• Anne Frank and Martin Luther King were born the same year.
  
  
• Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were both assassinated at the age of 39.
  
  
• France conducted its last state guillotining the year "Star Wars" was released.
  
  
• Universal same sex marriage in the US has existed longer than the Confederacy.
  
  
• When "Sanford and Son" debuted on TV, Red Foxx was 49. That's what 49 looked like back then.
  
  
• Wilford Brimley was only 49 when he was cast as an old man in the 1985 movie, "Cocoon." For comparison, Tom Cruise was 49 way back in 2013.
  
  
• Angela Lansbury, who is still alive, played the mother of a grown man in a movie that came out 59 years ago (The Manchurian Candidate).
  
  
• Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump were all born in the same year (1946).